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Micron rides AI memory squeeze to 3X revenue beat
Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) delivered fiscal Q2 results that didn't just top consensus - they rendered predictions largely irrelevant, with revenue landing at US$23.86 billion for the three months to March. That figure marks an eye-whopping 196% increase year-on-year (YoY) from $8.05 billion and a 75% sequential leap, according to the company's quarterly earnings release, against an LSEG consensus that had pencilled in $20.07 billion. The top-line overshoot was matched across the P&L, with non-GAAP EPS of $12.20 clearing the $9.31 Street estimate by 31% and GAAP gross margin hitting 74.4% - more than double the 36.8% registered a year ago and up sharply from 56.8% the preceding quarter. Net income surged to $13.79 billion from $1.58 billion in the prior-year period, while operating cash flow climbed to $11.90 billion from $8.41 billion, and adjusted free cash flow jumped 77% to $6.9 billion. Key beats at a glance:Revenue: $23.86 billion vs $20.07 billion est. (+19% beat)Non-GAAP EPS: $12.20 vs $9.31 est. (+31% beat)GAAP gross margin: 74.4% vs 56.8% prior quarterOperating cash flow: $11.90 billion vs $8.41 billion prior quarterAdjusted free cash flow: $6.9 billion vs $3.9 billion prior quarter Revenue metrics and gu
Tech
Europe's neoclouds land US$30bn in Mag 7 deals
Two companies most investors had never heard of 18 months ago landed a combined US$30 billion-plus in contracts from Magnificent Seven heavyweights in a single week - and NVIDIA is bankrolling the lot. Amsterdam-based Nebius Group (NASDAQ: NBIS) and London-headquartered Nscale released a string of announcements at NVIDIA's GTC 2026 conference as the world's largest tech companies increasingly turn to third-party providers to source AI compute. Nebius signed a five-year infrastructure supply agreement with Meta worth up to $27 billion - comprising $12 billion in dedicated capacity and a further $15 billion in additional compute across upcoming clusters. The deal is built around one of the first large-scale deployments of NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin platform, with delivery starting early 2027. Days earlier, NVIDIA itself invested $2 billion in Nebius as part of a strategic partnership to develop AI data centres, a deal that will help the Dutch firm deploy more than five gigawatts of NVIDIA systems by the end of 2030. NBIS shares surged roughly 15% in Monday pre-market trading on the Meta news alone. The stock has nearly quadrupled over the past 12 months and now commands a market capitalisation north of $32
Tech
Zuckerberg's AI gamble leads to 16,000 job cuts at Meta
Meta Platforms is weighing layoffs that could strip out roughly 20% of its staff - around 15,800 positions from a headcount of 78,865 - as the company looks to fund an AI infrastructure program that has yet to match rivals. Three people familiar with the discussions told Reuters that top executives have begun instructing senior leaders to plan for reductions, though no date or final figure has been set. "This is speculative reporting about theoretical approaches," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said. If the company proceeds at the 20% level, this would be its largest shake-up since the back-to-back rounds that shed roughly 21,000 jobs through late 2022 and early 2023 under what Zuckerberg branded the "year of efficiency". The advertising arm, for its part, is tracking well: the company's own Q4 earnings release showed EPS of $8.88, full-year revenue up 22% to $201 billion, and digital ads - still 97% of the top line - continuing to grow. Zuckerberg tipped his hand on the direction of travel during the January earnings call. "I expect 2026 to be the year that AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors. "We're starting to see projects that used to require big te
Tech
Google fills Anthropic's shoes at the Pentagon
A day after Anthropic sued the Trump administration over its supply chain risk designation, Google said it would introduce a new feature allowing civilian and military personnel to build custom AI agents for unclassified work on GenAI.mil, the Pentagon's enterprise AI portal. The tool - called Agent Designer - gives the Department of Defense's workforce of more than 3 million people a no-code or low-code interface to create their own digital assistants for repetitive administrative tasks, from drafting meeting notes to breaking large projects into step-by-step plans. DOD technology chief Emil Michael told Bloomberg he has "high confidence" Google will be "a great partner on all networks", and that the Pentagon was "moving on" from its Anthropic dispute - and that the matter would not be resolved through the courts. Along with Google, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Elon Musk's xAI Grok have also been cleared for the GenAI.mil platform, while Anthropic sits in federal court arguing the designation - historically reserved for foreign adversaries - was applied unlawfully and without due process.Source: AzzetAnthropic's blacklistingAnthropic had signed a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense back in July, becoming the fir
Tech
Oracle's AI leverage echoes the telecom debt playbook
Oracle reports its Q3 earnings to Wall Street after the bell - carrying more than US$100 billion in leverage, negative free cash flow, and the distinction of being the only hyperscaler bankrolling the AI buildout with borrowed money. Consensus expects roughly US$16.9 billion in revenue - a 20% jump and a clear acceleration from 13% growth in the first half of FY26 - yet the balance sheet tells a different story. And the company is carrying $113 billion in total debt to finance a compute buildout that has already tipped its free cash flow negative.Source: AzzetAnalysts project a full-year cash burn of around $23 billion, and management plans to raise another $45 billion to $50 billion through fresh bonds and equity this calendar year alone. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are spending at a comparable scale on AI compute, but capitalising it from operating cash flow, but Larry Ellison's outfit is the only one writing IOUs.Familiar sequenceAnyone who covered the late-1990s telecom buildout will recognise the shape of this trade. In the five years after the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996, telecom companies poured more than $500 billion - mostly leveraged - into laying fibre optic cable, on the thesis that internet traff

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Life360 reports first annual profit; users up 20%
Location sharing technology company Life360 reported its first annual profit last year as user numbers grew, though its shares dropped. Revenue last quarter was up 26% year-over-year to US$145.89 million, beating Zacks estimates by 1.4%. Earnings per share were $0.32, rising from $0.10 but just below estimates of $0.33. “2025 was a landmark year for Life360. For the first time in company history, we achieved annual net income, reflecting both the fundamental strength of our freemium model and the operating discipline we've built over the past several years," said Life360 CEO Lauren Antonoff. Across the year, total revenue was $489.48 million, up from $371.48 million. Net income was $150.83 million, recovering from 2024’s net loss of $4.56 million. Operating income last quarter was $8.95 million, rising from $5.72 million. Over the year, it swung to income of $18.83 million from a loss of $7.98 million. Adjusted EBITDA rose from $21.25 million to $32.43 million year-over-year in the fourth quarter, and grew 105% to $93.20 million across 2025. The company had 95.8 million monthly active users last quarter, climbing by 20% year-over-year. Monthly active users were up 16% to 50.6 million in the United States, 26% to
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Block to cut almost half its workforce, shares up 23%
Payments technology company Block will lay off almost half its workforce in favour of artificial intelligence tools, sending shares up 23%. Its headcount will be cut from over 10,000 employees to just under 6,000, according to CEO Jack Dorsey. “Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company. We're already seeing it internally. A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better,” wrote Dorsey in a letter to shareholders. “We believe Block will be significantly more valuable as a smaller, faster, intelligence-native company. Everything we do from here is in service of that.” U.S. employees who have been laid off will receive their salaries for at least 20 weeks and an additional US$5,000, with employees in other countries given an equivalent based on local requirements. Around 70% of businesses actively use AI, per a study this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research that surveyed executives in the U.S, United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany. Almost 90% reported AI had no impact on labour productivity over the past three years, however. Block’s fourth quarter earnings, also released today, saw the company raise its guidance following strong
Tech
OpenAI halves compute target to US$600bn by 2030
OpenAI has slashed its compute spending target by more than half - from US$1.4 trillion to $600 billion by 2030. Revised guidance ties capital outlay directly to a revenue forecast of more than $280 billion annually by decade's end. Reported by CNBC, citing sources familiar with the matter, the announcement lands as OpenAI closes in on a funding round expected to exceed $100 billion - carrying a pre-money valuation of $730 billion. Revised guidance anchors compute expenditure to a defined revenue trajectory, replacing the $1.4 trillion figure CEO Sam Altman had been circulating since mid-2025, when he outlined plans to develop 30 gigawatts of computing capacity - sufficient to power roughly 25 million U.S. homes. Hitting $280 billion in annual revenue would require OpenAI to more than 20x its 2025 intake of $13.1 billion across five years, with consumer and enterprise each contributing roughly half. 2025 delivered genuine outperformance - internal targets called for $10 billion in revenue and $9 billion in cash burn; actuals came in at $13.1 billion and $8 billion, respectively.$600bn is still an enormous commitmentSix hundred billion dollars in infrastructure outlay over five years dwarfs the capital expenditure progr
Tech
Agentic AI's liability time bomb is already ticking
The agentic AI adoption numbers are hard to argue with - McKinsey clocks software engineering agent deployment at 24%, PwC puts enterprise uptake at 79%, and the market is priced for a run from US$7.8 billion to north of $52 billion by 2030. The production data, though, sits at a significant distance from those headlines. Deloitte found that just 11% of organisations have agentic AI in active production, while Forrester projects that enterprises will defer 25% of planned AI spend into 2027 as ROI fails to materialise. And global tech advisory Gartner predicts that more than 40% of projects will be cancelled by the end of next year. The reason isn't that the tech doesn't work - it's that most vendors aren't selling what they claim. Gartner reckons only around 130 out of thousands of self-described agentic AI companies are building systems that actually qualify, with the rest rebranding chatbots and RPA tools under the "agentic" banner. The firm calls it agent washing, and the investment market hasn't priced a cancellation wave. That's the first problem. The second is more serious.Credit: Drexel LeBow/PreciselyOn 9 December 2026, the rules changeThat's when the EU's new Product Liability Directive takes effect, exp